Patriarchy Matters: Toward a Gendered Theory of Teen Violence and Victimization

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Violence Against Women

DOI: 10.1177/1077801207310430 2007; 13; 1249 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Lyn Mikel Brown, Meda Chesney-Lind and Nan Stein Victimization

Patriarchy Matters: Toward a Gendered Theory of Teen Violence and

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Authors’ Note: The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

Violence Against WomenVolume 13 Number 12

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Patriarchy MattersToward a Gendered Theory of Teen Violence and VictimizationLyn Mikel BrownColby CollegeMeda Chesney-LindUniversity of Hawaii at ManoaNan SteinWellesley College

This article explores the role that the sex–gender system plays in shaping both the vio-lence and victimization of girls. Taking first the issue of girls’ violence, the article arguesthat steep increases in girls’ arrests are not the product of girls becoming more like boys.Instead, forms of girls’ minor violence that were once ignored are now being criminal-ized. Shifting gears, the article explores how “gender-neutral” relabeling of girls’ victim-ization in schools, a site of much violence against girls, is extremely problematic.Renaming “sexual harassment” as “bullying” tends to psychopathologize gender violencewhile simultaneously stripping girl victims of powerful legal rights and remedies. Toillustrate this latter point, a “model” antibullying program, The Bullying PreventionProgram, is reviewed. Offering a one-size-fits-all view of bullying, it assumes all bully-ing can be approached psychologically or relationally, thereby minimizing the structuralunderpinnings of such behavior.

Keywords: bullying; gendered violence; girls’ violence; girls’ victimization

Concern about girls’ aggression and violence has rarely been higher, largely becausethe general public feels that girls’ violence is increasing at a remarkable rate. The

media have played a central role in this perception, not only in showcasing girls’ vio-lence, but also by providing the public with the explanation for this perplexing “new”phenomenon. Take the extensive media coverage of the hazing incident at suburbanChicago’s Glenbrook High School in spring of 2003, or a more recent example fromSan Francisco. In this latter instance, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front page storywarning residents about the “Hill Girls,” a “violent clique of about 20 young women”who “prey on women” (Hendrix, 2003). Police there said they were “surprised by the



1250 Violence Against Women

savagery of the attacks,” noting that although gang members sometimes selectively sin-gled out their victims because of personal vendettas, “other victims appear to be ran-domly selected such as one woman who brushed up against one of the gang memberson a bus. She was attacked after leaving the bus.”

According to the article, the officers linked the girls to “15 incidents” and wanted thegroup, “whose members are African American” labeled a “criminal street gang.” Onegang officer continued, “these women are extremely violent, and they are not lockingthemselves into distinct boundaries” (Hendrix, 2003, p. A2). The officers also claimedthat this was a new challenge for the city: “We know there are all-girl gangs in othercities, but this is the first we have seen in San Francisco” (Hendrix, 2003, p. A1). Laterreporting would reveal that the most serious injury caused by this girl gang was a “bro-ken elbow” and that actually the gang wasn’t new. In fact, the “Potrero Hill Posse,” agroup of African American girls from a public housing project in the area, was first doc-umented over a decade earlier in an ethnographic study of gangs in San Francisco(Lauderback, Hansen, & Waldorf, 1992; Ryan, 2003).

Most media treatments link the increase in girls’ violence to girls becoming morelike boys (the “dark” side, if you will, of girls’ and women’s quest for equality). Asan example, the Boston Globe Magazine ran an article that proclaimed on its cover,over huge red letters that said BAD GIRLS, “girls are moving into the world of vio-lence that once belonged to boys” (Ford, 1998), and from the San Jose Mercurycomes a story entitled, “In a new twist on equality, girls’ crimes resemble boys’” andfeatures an opening paragraph that argues,

Juvenile crime experts have spotted a disturbing nationwide pattern of teenage girlsbecoming more sophisticated and independent criminals. In the past, girls would almostalways commit crimes with boys or men. But now, more than ever, they’re calling theshots. (Guido, 1998, p. 1B)

The media are often eager to showcase “bad girls,” and not infrequently their vio-lence is linked to women seeking equality with men, with the assumption that as anexorable part of that process they will become more like men in areas like crime andviolence. This position is actually decades old. In fact, since early in the past century,criminologists have been issuing dire warnings that women’s demand for equalitywould result in a dramatic change in the character and frequency of women’s crime(Pollak, 1961; Smart, 1976). Implicit in this “masculinization” theory of women’s vio-lence (Pollock, 1999) is the companion notion that contemporary theories of violence(and crime more broadly) need not really attend to gender, but can simply “add womenand stir.” That is, it assumes that the same forces that propel men into violence will alsoincreasingly produce violence in girls and women. Moreover, the masculinizationframework lays the foundation for responding to girls’ and boys’ violence “equally” orin gender-neutral ways.



In this article, we interrogate the role that the sex-gender system plays in shapingboth the violence and victimization of girls and as key policies related to these issues.We argue that steep increases in girls’ arrests are not the product of girls’ becomingmore like boys. Instead, it is the case that forms of girls’ minor violence that were onceignored are now being criminalized with serious consequences, particularly for girls ofcolor. Shifting gears from the criminal to the civil side of the legal system, we thenexplore how “gender neutral” relabeling of girls’victimization in schools, a site of muchviolence against girls, is extremely problematic. Renaming “sexual harassment” as“bullying” tends to psycho-pathologize gender violence while simultaneously strippinggirl victims of powerful legal rights and remedies under civil law, particularly federallaw Title IX. To illustrate, we critically review an Office of Juvenile Justice andDelinquency Prevention (OJJDP) “model” anti-bullying program used in communitiesacross the U.S., The Bullying Prevention Program developed by Dan Olweus.

Thinking Critically About Girls’ Arrest Trends

To understand the renewed focus on girls’ violence, it is important to review thecrime trends that drew media attention to youth violence over the past decade. Aftera period of some stability in the 1980s, the violent crime rate for juveniles soared inthe early 1990s, with a nearly 300% growth in the youth homicide rate between 1983and 1994 (Synder & Sickmund, 1999). The vast majority of violent perpetrators andvictims during the youth violence epidemic were boys and young men of color, so themedia coverage of the “epidemic” was initially focused on boys. By the mid-1990s,though, boys’ arrests began to decline, whereas girls’ arrests did not—a fact that wasalso not lost on the media. They discovered, as did the rest of the country, that whatcame to be known as the “crime drop” (Blumstein & Wallman, 2000) was, in reality,a male crime drop, at least among youth.

Between 1992 and 2003, girls’ arrests increased 6.4%, whereas arrests of boys actu-ally decreased by 16.4%. Although decreases were seen across many crimes of violencefor both boys and girls, the period saw a 7% increase in girls’ arrests for aggravatedassault, but a 29.1% decrease in boys’ arrests for this offense. Likewise, arrests of girlsfor assault climbed an astonishing 40.9% when boys’ arrests climbed by only 4.3%(Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2003).

Concomitant with these arrest increases were increases in girls’ referrals tojuvenile courts from police and other sources (e.g., school officials and parents).Between 1990 and 1999, the number of delinquency cases involving girls increasedby 59% (from 250,000 to 398,600) compared to a 19% increase for males; from1,066,900 to 1,274,500 (Stahl, 2003). Looking at specific offense types, the reportobserved: “The growth in cases involving females outpaced the growth in casesinvolving males in all offense categories. For both males and females, simple assault

Brown et al. / Teen Violence and Victimization 1251



cases increased more than any other person offense (136% for females and 80% formales)” (Stahl, 2003, p. 1).

Finally, and most significantly, the detention of girls (a focus of three decades of“deinstitutionalization” efforts) has suddenly increased. Between 1989 and 1998,girls’ detentions increased by 56% compared to a 20% increase seen in boys’ deten-tions, and the “large increase was tied to the growth in the number of delinquencycases involving females charged with person offenses (157%)” (Harms, 2002, p. 1).

Clearly, more girls were arrested in the last decade, and they were being arrestedfor “nontraditional” offenses such as assault and aggravated assault. At first glance, itseemed that the media hype about bad girls was not an exaggeration after all; girlswere closing the gender gap in violence, just like they were closing the gap in sportsparticipation. Are girls becoming more like boys when it comes to violence? If so,what should our response be? To many policy makers and practitioners, it seems onlyfair to treat girls the same way they would treat boys. After all, they’re acting like boys.

Are Girls Really Getting More Violent?

Actually, there are several reasons to be highly skeptical about the notion that therecent increases in girls’ arrests mean that girls are getting more violent. As an example,several self-report data sources reveal that boys’ and girls’ violence decreased dramati-cally in the late 1990s, thus indicating that the youth violence epidemic had significantlywaned for both boys and girls. Most interesting, these self-reports indicate that girls’rates of violence decreased more dramatically than boys’ rates, a direct contradiction tothe trends seen in female juvenile arrests.1

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been monitoringyouthful behavior in a national sample of school-aged youth in a number of domains(including violence) at regular intervals since 1991 in a biennial survey, the YouthRisk Behavior Survey. A quick look at data collected over the last decade reveals thatalthough 34.4% of girls surveyed in 1991 said that they had been in a physical fightin the last year, by 2001 that figure had dropped to 23.9% or a 30.5% decrease ingirls’ fighting. Boys’ violence also decreased during the same period, but less dra-matically, from 50.2% to 43.1%, a 14.1% drop (CDC, 1992-2002).

There are other reasons to be skeptical of the arrest data; notably, studies of othersystems that also monitor injury and mortality apparently do not show dramaticincreases in violent victimization. Males and Shorter (2001) have reviewed hospitaladmission data and vital statistics maintained by the health department over the pastdecades in San Francisco and they note decreases, not increases, in girls’ injuries andmortality rates. More broadly, victimization data collected by the National CrimeVictimization Survey (NCVS) show decreases in violent victimization amongfemales (15.7% decrease) from 1999 to 2000 and 2001 to 2002, and also decreasesin the violent victimization of youths. In fact, the second greatest decrease in violent




victimization was reported by youth aged 12 to 15 (Rennison & Rand, 2003), a ratethat approached the decrease noted in the violent victimization of individuals aged50 to 64 (27.8%).

Finally, there are the arrest data on forms of violence, other than assault and aggra-vated assault. Surely if girls were getting more violent generally, one would expect thattrend to manifest itself in other crimes of violence, such as robbery and murder (par-ticularly because aggravated assault is supposed to involve “severe” or aggravated bod-ily injury” including either a weapon or “means likely to produce death or great bodilyharm”) (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2003, p. 454). Yet, consistently, arrests of girls for other serious crimes of violence, including the most lethal, have showndecreases, not increases. As an example, arrests of girls for the offense of murder actu-ally decreased by 42.8% in the period between 1993 and 2002, and female robberyarrests were down by 36.2% (FBI, 2003). If girls were simply getting more violentover all, wouldn’t this eventually show up in other forms of the same behavior? Thesedata, too, suggest that something else, something specific to the arrest process in thearea of assaults, is changing. And here we approach the equity question again, butarguably from a different angle: What little we know about actual trends in girls’ vio-lence suggests that someone’s behavior has been changing, but it is likely not girls, butrather those who police and monitor girls’ behavior (e.g., police, teachers, and parents)who are acting differently. Moreover, it may well be the desire to punish girls’ violenceas if it is the same as boys’ violence that has, in fact, produced much of the run up ingirls’ arrests.

Shifting Enforcement Practices

If girls’ behavior is not becoming more violent, then what explains the hugeincreases in female arrests for violence? Elsewhere, it has been noted that there arethree forces likely at work: “relabeling” (sometimes called “bootstrapping”) of girls’status offense behavior from noncriminal charges such as “incorrigibility” to assaultivecharges, “rediscovery of girls’ violence,” and “upcriming” of minor forms of youthviolence, including girls’ physical aggression. (For a full discussion of these issues, seeChesney-Lind & Belknap, 2004). Let’s take each in turn.

Girls have traditionally been arrested for status offenses (noncriminal offenses suchas “runaway,” being “incorrigible,” and “person in need of supervision”), but many ofus suspect that girls engaged in these behaviors are now being relabeled as violentoffenders, partially as a consequence of parents being advised to do so should theywish their defiant daughters arrested and detained, and partially as a result of chang-ing police practices.

Some researchers now blame much of the increase in the arrests of both girls andwomen for assault to arrests of girls and women for domestic violence (Greenfeld &Snell, 1999). In California, for example, arrests of girls and women for domestic




violence increased from 6% of the total in 1988 to 16.5% in 1998 (Bureau of CriminalInformation and Analysis, 1999). Significantly, race also plays a role, here; AfricanAmerican girls and women had arrest rates for domestic violence roughly three times thatof White girls and women in 1998 (Bureau of Criminal Information and Analysis, 1999).

Reviews of girls’ case files clearly indicate the role family violence plays in girls’arrests for assault. Acoca’s (1999) assessment of 1,000 girls’ files from different pointsin the juvenile justice system in four California counties found that although roughlyone third of these girls were charged with “person offenses,” the majority of theseinvolved assault rather than robbery or more serious crimes of violence. Furthermore,“a close reading of the case files of girls charged with assault revealed that most ofthese charges were the result of nonserious, mutual combat, situations with parents.”In many cases, she contends, “the aggression was initiated by the adults.” Acoca notedthat in one case, “father lunged at her while she was calling the police about a domes-tic dispute. She (girl) hit him.” In another case, “She (girl) was trying to sneak out ofthe house at night, but mom caught her and pushed her against the wall.” Finally, shereports that some cases were quite trivial in nature, including a girl arrested “for throw-ing cookies at her mother” (Acoca, 1999, pp. 7-8).

In a number of these instances, the possibility that the child, not the parent, is actu-ally a victim cannot be completely ignored, particularly when girls and defense attor-neys continue to report such a pattern. Marlee Ford, an attorney working with theBronx Defenders Office, commented, “Some girls have been abused all their lives . . .Finally, they get to an age where they can hit back. And they get locked up” (quotedin Russ, 2004, p. 20).

Less direct, but still confirmatory evidence of the same pattern can be found inCanada, where a recent national review of youth charged with “violent crimes”found that “two-thirds of female youths were charged with common assault com-pared to just under half (46%) of male youths” (Savoie, 1999, p. 1)

Then there is the fact that girls have always been more violent than their stereotypeas weak and passive “good girls” would suggest, so that the periodic “discoveries” oftheir violence is pretty much part of a media staple (some call this “man-bites-dog”journalism). Self-report data, as noted earlier, have always shown clearly that girls doget into fights, and they even occasionally carry weapons. As an example, in 2001,about a quarter of girls reported that they were in a physical fight, and about 1 in 20carried a weapon. Until recently, girls’ aggression, even their physical aggression, wastrivialized rather than criminalized. Law enforcement, parents, social workers, andteachers were once more concerned with controlling girl’s sexuality than they werewith their violence, but recent research suggests that may be changing.

The notable increase in youthful violence seen in the early 1990s was waning bythe end of that decade, but recall that the 1990s ended with dramatic and, manywould say, atypical school shootings such as the events at Columbine High School inLittleton, Colorado in April of 1999. The combined effect of these events was to pro-duce legions of school policies to formally contain and officially respond to youth




violence, particularly around and in schools (for a full discussion of these issues, seeChesney-Lind & Irwin, 2004). Upcriming refers to policies (e.g., “zero-tolerancepolicies”) that have the effect of increasing the severity of criminal penalties associ-ated with particular offenses, like minor forms of school bullying and fighting.

Criminologists have long known that arrests of youth for minor or “other” assaultscan range from schoolyard tussles to relatively serious, but not life-threatening assaults(Steffensmeier & Steffensmeier, 1980). Currie (1998) adds to this the fact that these“simple assaults without injury” are often “attempted” or “threatened” or “not com-pleted.” A few decades ago, schoolyard fights and other instances of bullying werelargely ignored or handled internally by schools and parents.

But at a time when official concern about youth violence is almost unparalleled and“zero tolerance” policies proliferate, school principals are increasingly likely to callpolice onto their campuses. As an example, in Pennsylvania, school districts refer anychild who threatened violence or was violent to juvenile court (Schwartz & Rieser,2001). It should come as no surprise that youthful arrests in this area are up as aconsequence, with both race and gender implications. Specifically, although AfricanAmerican children represent only 42% of public school enrollment, they constitute61% of the children charged with a disciplinary code violation. And these violationshave serious consequences; according to a U.S. Department of Education report, 25%of all African American students nationally were suspended at least once over a 4-yearperiod (Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2000, p. vi).

Simpkins, Hirsch, Horvat, and Moss (2004) focus their attention on what theydescribe as the “obvious but unexplored connection between abuse and school failurefor girls” (p. 19). Interviews with 44 girls in detention in Philadelphia, 63% of whomwere African American, found that “truancy, suspension, poor grades or expulsion isalmost universal” (p. 19). Girls who were suffering abuse were not able to get help atschool, according to their interviews; instead, they were either ignored or yelled at orbullied by other youth. Finally, some began acting out, because “girls often respond tointerpersonal problems with aggressive behavior” (Beyer, cited in Simpkins et al., 2004,p. 28). This aggression, which is “a common defense against helplessness among trau-matized delinquent girls,” then becomes a reason for their expulsion and detention.

Focus groups with delinquent girls in Ohio training schools found that girls’attempts to protect themselves from sexual harassment have also resulted in girlsbeing expelled from school (Belknap, Dunn, & Holsinger, 1997). In one instance, agirl told school authorities that an older boy in the school was following her as shewalked to and from school and that she was afraid of him. The school refused to lookinto it, but when the girl put a knife in her sock to protect herself getting to and fromschool, the school’s “no tolerance” code for weapons resulted in her incarceration,despite the fact that it was her first offense.

Upcriming, like zero tolerance policies, can have very troubling implications foreconomically marginalized communities, because youth in these communities havealways been heavily monitored and policed. The relabeling and upcriming of girls’




minor offenses (including status offenses such as “incorrigibility”) to assault and othercriminal offenses have been particularly pronounced in the official delinquency ofAfrican American girls (Bartollas, 1993; Robinson, 1990). This practice also facilitatesthe incarceration of girls in detention facilities and training schools, something thatwould not be possible if the girl were arrested for noncriminal status offenses.

Returning to San Francisco, where the media panic about the “Hill Girls” flour-ished, Males (2003) found that African American girls’ arrest rates there for feloniesare three times higher, for robbery seven times higher, and for felony drugs 10 timeshigher, than for girls in Los Angeles. In fact, according to Males, African Americangirls in San Francisco make up just 2% of California’s black girls, but they comprisefully 12% of the state’s female arrests for robbery. Commenting on the pattern, Malesnoted, “Forget the evil streets of South Central and East Oakland—the Mission andHunter’s Point are where the new Criminal Girl rides. In fact, robbery rates among SanFrancisco girls are almost as high as for Los Angeles boys!” (Males, 2003, p. 1).

Not surprisingly, these same patterns showed up in San Francisco detention statis-tics, where the city saw a 64% increase in girls’ detentions coupled with a 12.5%decrease in boys’ detentions between 1992 and 2000. Again, this pattern dramaticallyvaried by ethnic group: Detention of White girls was actually down slightly in SanFrancisco, but there was a 90% increase in the number of African American girlsdetained and a 209% increase in the detentions of Hispanic girls. Other girls of colorwere also at higher risk of detention as we entered the new millennium (Males, 2003).

Perhaps the pattern found in San Francisco and hinted at in other research explainswhy, nationally, amidst rising detentions of girls, it is girls of color who are increas-ingly likely to be detained. According to the American Bar Association and NationalBar Association (2001), African American girls make up nearly half of those in securedetention, and they are also far less likely than their White counterparts to have theircases dismissed; 7 out of 10 cases involving White girls were dismissed compared to3 out of 10 of African American girls. Although not as specific in terms of gender, thesame pattern appears to be found in the detention of Latino youth; according to a Michigan State University study, between 1983 and 1991, the age of Latino andLatina youth in public detention centers increased by 84%, compared to an 8%increase for White youth and a 46% increase for youth overall (Villarruel et al., 2002).One researcher, examining these racialized patterns noted, “Not since slavery have wewitnessed a system so effective at arresting Black womanhood as today’s juvenile jus-tice system” (Morris, 2002, p. 1).

In short, criminalizing girls’ violence, such as the justice system’s earlier efforts tocriminalize their sexuality, has had an enormous impact on girls and juvenile justice.But although the earlier policing of girls was justified by gender difference, today’spattern is masked as gender equity. The results of what might be called “vengefulequity,” though, are clearly as disadvantageous to girls as the earlier pattern of inequal-ity. In both systems, girls are the clear losers, and neither affords them the justicepromised by a system that purports to seek the “best interest of the child.”




From the Criminal Justice System to the Public School System

In the same ways that girls are disadvantaged in the criminal justice system, theirrights have been eroded in the civil arena of law. Our schools, 30 years after the pas-sage of federal law Title IX, are still filled with abundant examples of student-to-student gender-based harassment and violence. Despite continuing guidance on federallaw Title IX (sex discrimination in education) from federal agencies and the federalcourts, including the U.S. Supreme Court (Davis v. Monroe), results from surveysattesting to the ugly entrenchment of sexual and gender harassment in our schools(American Association of University Women Foundation and Harris Interactive, 2001;GLSEN, 2004; Human Rights Watch, 2001), and laws at both the federal and statelevels that require attention and compliance from school officials, our nation’s schoolsare riddled with examples of conduct that qualifies as gender-based harassment or vio-lence. Yet sexual or gender-based harassment rarely shows up in any of the standardanalyses of school violence; gender is the missing discourse of rights.

As noted earlier, the nation was mesmerized by the shootings at Columbine HighSchool, and in an effort to make sense of this horrific, but very rare event, the publicbecame convinced that it was, somehow a harbinger of things to come. Overnight,reports appeared on the topic of “school violence,” with many urging that schools takemeasures that allegedly make a school safer by passing state laws on bullying and/orsuspending and expelling more students under the “one strike, you are out” mentalityof zero tolerance. This approach has taken over the good senses of the educational andlegislative establishments. What has gotten lost in this surge of reports and frenzy toreduce a rather expansive notion of bullying in schools are the rights of students to goto school in an environment that is gender-safe, free from gender-based harassmentand violence.

Our disagreement with the extremely popular framework of bullying is that it bothdegenders harassment and removes it from the discourse of rights by placing it into amore psychological, pathologizing realm. Our objections to these antibullying effortsembodied both in the new laws and the training efforts that have accompanied themare multiple: (a) they largely do not hold school administrators liable in the sameways to resolve the problems that federal law Title IX requires, but instead put theonus of solving the problem on the victim; (b) most of these antibullying laws areoverly broad and arbitrary, with the result that students are suspended or expelledfrom schools for a variety of minor infractions; and yet (c) sometimes egregiousbehaviors are framed as bullying when, in fact, they may constitute illegal sexual orgender harassment or even criminal hazing or assault.

There are two broad consequences of these antibullying laws. The first is to furtherdegender school safety by the use of the gender-neutral term, “bullying.” Althoughsometimes employing psychotherapeutic language (as bullying is a term that has beentransplanted from 30 years in the psychological literature), antibullying legislation




may serve to undermine the legal rights and protections offered by antiharassmentlaws. A second consequence is to shift the discussion of school safety away from alarger civil rights framework that encompassed both racial and sex discrimination andharassment to one that focuses on, pathologizes, and in some cases, demonizes indi-vidual behavior: the bully (Stein, 2001b, 2003).

In the United States, the discourse around bullying is a relatively new phenomenon,in large part imported from the Europeans and the research conducted there since the1970s (e.g., Ahmad & Smith, 1994; Olweus, 1993). Prior to the emphasis on bullyingas a new trend for U.S. educators and researchers, redress of injustices and wrongswere addressed through civil and constitutional rights (Whalen & Whalen, 1985).Sexual harassment and sex discrimination laws grew out of the larger civil rightsmovement of the 1960s, and the equal employment rights movement of the 1960s and1970s (Baker, 2004; Farley, 1978; Hoff, 1991; MacKinnon, 1979, 2001; O’Connor,1980). However, those linkages and legacies are now in jeopardy: The discourse ofbullying may eclipse the rights discourse (Stein, 2003).

Consider the case that was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999, the details of which demonstrate the implications of the bully versus harassment distinction.LaShonda Davis was repeatedly touched, grabbed, and verbally harassed by a maleclassmate in her fifth grade class. The boy, who is only known by his initials, G.F.,repeatedly attempted to touch LaShonda’s breasts and genital area, rubbed against herin a sexual manner, constantly asked her for sex and, in one instance, put a doorstop inhis pants to simulate an erection and then came at her in a sexually suggestive manner(Brake, 1999). By no stretch of the imagination was this boy subtle or was his behav-ior ambiguous; rather, it was persistent and unrelenting. Should these behaviors havebeen called bullying or sexual harassment? The answer to this question has vitallyimportant consequences for LaShonda, for her assailant, and for the teachers andschool administrators.

LaShonda did not respond passively to the boy’s behavior. Besides telling G.F. to stop,she also told her teachers. Her parents also complained to her teachers and asked to haveLaShonda’s seat moved. But her teachers and school officials did nothing, not even sep-arate the two students who sat next to each other. G.F.’s behavior was clearly affectingLaShonda, both psychologically and academically. After several months of this harass-ment, LaShonda’s grades fell and she wrote a suicide note. Her parents filed a criminalcomplaint against the boy and also a federal civil rights lawsuit against the school districtfor permitting a sexually hostile environment to exist. In the criminal action, the boy pledguilty to sexual battery. And after 5 years of legal battles and appeals, the U.S. SupremeCourt, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that schools are liable for student-to-student sexual harass-ment if the school officials knew about the sexual harassment and failed to take action(Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 1999).

It is highly unlikely that if these behaviors had been framed as bullying, LaShonda’scase would have ever been heard in a federal court, let alone in the U.S. SupremeCourt. As it was, the conduct that was inflicted on her, by both the male classmate and




the treatment that she received from school personnel, was framed as civil rights vio-lations. To have viewed this conduct as bullying would have relegated her case to theprincipal’s office, a place where she had not received justice or redress prior to filing a federal lawsuit or a criminal complaint. Moreover, the context and timing ofthe Davis decision proved to be crucial. It came one month after the shootings atColumbine High School (April 1999), putting the subject of sexual harassment inschools into the midst of the national conversation about school safety.

The Research Arena: Harassment or Bullying?

A typical example of the problems associated with the conflation of bullying andharassment can be found in the April 24, 2001, issue of the Journal of the AmericanMedical Association (JAMA; Nansel et al., 2001). This study of nearly 16,000 6ththrough 10th graders from public and private schools came from a larger sample ofthose who had filled out a World Health Organization instrument administered in 1998in 30 countries. To be applicable, the original instrument had to use questions and def-initions that would make sense in all of the 30 participating countries. Thus, behaviorsthat legally could be sexual harassment or assault in the United States were framed asbullying for purposes of this survey; for example: being hit, slapped or pushed, spread-ing rumors, or making sexual comments. Again, terms used in the survey had to con-form to definitions in 30 countries, from France to Indonesia (Best, 2002).

In the United States, the results showed that nearly 30% of the sample reportedmoderate or frequent involvement in bullying, either as the bully (13%), one who wasbullied (10.6%), or both (6.3%). Males were more likely than females to be both per-petrators and targets of bullying.

But the term “sexual harassment” was never raised, not by the researchers nor inthe accompanying article in JAMA written by public health researchers, Spivak andProthrow-Smith (2001). To engage 6th through 10th graders in this discourse of bul-lying without acknowledging the realities of sexual or racial harassment is to infan-tilize and mislead them because some of the behaviors described as bullying are, infact, criminal conduct, or could be covered by sexual harassment or other civil rightsin education laws.

Compare this JAMA article with the findings of two other studies released 2 monthslater, both of which received scant publicity. First, Human Rights Watch considered theharassment of gay and lesbian students in U.S. schools (Hatred in the hallways:Violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studentsin U.S. schools). The second study, by the American Association of University WomenFoundation and Harris Poll (2001; Hostile hallways II: Bullying, teasing and sexualharassment in school), involved students the same ages as those studied in the JAMAarticle, who were surveyed about their experiences with sexual and gender harassment.




In both studies, the euphemism “bullying” was not used as it was in the two JAMAarticles when describing behaviors that constitute sexual and gender-based harass-ment. In the AAUW study, sexual harassment was found to be widespread in schools,with 83% of the girls and 79% of the boys indicating that they had ever been sexuallyharassed. In all, 30% of the girls and 24% of the boys reported that they were sexu-ally harassed often. Nearly half of all students who experienced sexual harassmentfelt very or somewhat upset afterwards, pointing to the negative impact that sexualharassment has on the emotional and educational lives of students.

In the Human Rights Watch study, 140 gay, lesbian, and bisexual students, alongwith 130 school and youth service personnel, in seven states were interviewed. Theresults showed an alarming portrait of daily human rights abuses of the students bytheir peers and, in some cases, by some of their teachers and administrators.

We are not proposing that the word “bullying” be purged from the language, butrather that the word be utilized in an age-appropriate way with young children. Youngchildren, unlike teenagers, might be hard pressed to understand the concepts of sex-ual harassment or sexual violence. But, even if the term “bullying” is used instead of“harassment” with young children, school officials cannot dismiss their legal liability toabide by sexual harassment laws and to ensure that schools do not discriminate on thebasis of sex. Moreover, to use the word “bullying” to cover some behaviors that mayconstitute criminal or civil violations is to perform a great disservice to young people;the word “bullying” may infantilize them, but the law will not.

On one hand, it is as if “bullying” has become the stand-in for other behaviors thatschool and public health officials, scholars, legislators, and researchers do not want toname, such as racism, homophobia, sexism, or hate crimes. On the other hand, thisloose and liberal use of the term “bullying” may be part of a general trend to labelchildren, particularly in a culture that tends to psycho-pathologize behaviors.

Psychologists seem to dominate the field of bullying research and largely seemunfamiliar with nearly 30 years of research from the fields of education, sociology,anthropology, and feminist legal scholarship; fields that might instead frame the bul-lying behaviors as gendered violence or sexual harassment. Although the bullyingresearchers may acknowledge the existence of sexual harassment in schools, they gen-erally only cite surveys or court decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court and largelyhave ignored a wealth of studies and articles from researchers who have employedwidely different methodologies and have long argued for a gendered critique ofchildren’s behaviors. Included among the scholars who have conducted relevantresearch on gender are Lever (1976); Stein (1981, 1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1999, 2001a;Bogart & Stein, 1987); Kimmel (1987, 1996, 2000); Thorne (1989, 1993); Eder (1985,1997); Fineran and Bennett (1995, 1998, 1999; Fineran, 1996); Shakeshaft (Shakeshaft,Barber, Hergenrother, & Johnson, 1997; Shakeshaft et al., 1995; Shakeshaft &Mandel, 2000); Lee, Croninger, Linn, and Chen (1996); Lesko (2000); and Tolman,Spencer, Rosen-Reynoso, and Porche (2003).

In addition, the omission or denial of gender from the dominant construction ofschool safety and violence contributes to the disproportionate focus on the most




extreme, rare forms of violence, whereas the more insidious threats to safety arelargely ignored (Lesko, 2000; Stein, 1995, 1999; Stein, Tolman, Porche, & Spencer,2002). An example of this failure to factor in the saliency of gender in school violenceis reflected in the many reports and analyses of the spate of school shootings, the formof school violence that has attracted the most national attention and incited the mostpanic (Kimmel, 2001). In general, the school shootings were widely reported in a gender-neutral way, when in fact the majority of these tragedies were perpetrated byWhite middle-class boys who were upset either about a break-up or rejection by a girl(e.g., Jonesboro, Arkansas; Pearl, Mississippi), or who did not meet traditional expec-tations and norms of masculinity (e.g., Columbine, Colorado) and were thus persecutedby their peers (Kimmel, 2001; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine,2003; Perlstein, 1998; Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002).

This failure to consider the role of gender is also endemic to much of the bullyingresearch. Researchers of bullying, for the most part, have unfortunately failed to con-sider the ways in which adolescent boys (and adult men) unmercifully police eachother with rigid and conventional notions of masculinity and the imposition of com-pulsive heterosexuality. Not to factor in or even recognize these potent elements is todeny a central and operating feature in boy culture, namely the maniacally driven, tire-less efforts to define oneself as “not gay.” Researchers such as Pleck (1981), Connell(1987, 1995), Kimmel (1987, 1996, 2000, 2001), and Messner (1990) have writtenabout this phenomenon and its consequences for several decades, yet most bullyingresearchers have failed to draw on their findings.

Violence in Teenage Relationships

There are two questions on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a compre-hensive survey about general behavior of teens from the U.S. Department of Healthand Human Services and the CDC, that ask about violence in teen dating relation-ships. One of those questions inquires about physical violence in a dating relationship,and the second question asks about sexual violence in a dating relationship (http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/yrbs).

Data from both versions of the YRBS (the state-by-state version and the nationalversion, with its sample of 13,000 or so students aged 14 to 18 years old) show thatin some states, up to 20% of girls experience violence from a dating partner, somephysical violence and some sexual violence. For example, in Massachusetts, 20% ofthe girls experienced one form of the violence (Silverman, Raj, Mucci, & Hathaway,2001). A more socially and religiously conservative state, Idaho (Idaho Departmentof Education, 2003), shows a safer picture; nevertheless, 10% of students report phys-ical violence from a dating partner (7.6% females, 11.8% boys). The responses to thequestion about being forced to have sexual intercourse in Idaho showed 7.8% (10.5 %females, and 5.2% males). Moreover, a recent analysis of the national 2001 data from




6,864 female students in grades 9 through 12 found that 17.7% of the girls reportedbeing intentionally physically hurt by a date in the previous year (Silverman, Raj, &Clements, 2004).

Prevalence data on sexual violence in elementary and middle schools have not beenconsistently collected, disaggregated, or reported. Researchers lack a complete pictureabout the violence that children younger than 12 experience, whether that violencehappens at home, in the streets, in public spaces, or at school. This lack of informationmay lie largely with the resistance of the parents who will not permit researchers to askthese sorts of questions to children younger than 12 years old.

Only recently have self-report data from children younger than 12 been collected.Since its origin in 1929, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system and theBureau of Justice Statistics’ NCVS did not collect information about crimes com-mitted against persons under 12 years of age and, thus, could not provide a compre-hensive picture of juvenile crime victimization (Finkelhor & Ormrod, p.1). The newNational Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is designed to replace the UCRas the national database for crimes reported to law enforcement and it now includesdata about juvenile victims (Finkelhor & Ormrod, 2000). However, participation bythe states and local jurisdictions is incremental and voluntary. The crime experiencesof large urban areas are particularly underrepresented, and the system does not yethave a nationally representative sample (Finkelhor & Ormrod, 2000).

Nonetheless, the 1997 NIBRS data from 12 states revealed some key findings aboutjuvenile crime and preteen victims, data that were previously uncollected. Althoughchildren younger than age 12 represent only a small percentage of all reported victims(3% of all crimes and 6% of crimes against persons), their crime profile is unusual.Sexual assault accounts for almost one third of this preteen victimization, more thantwice the proportion for older juveniles, and family offenders make up one third of theoffenders against this group, twice the proportion for older juveniles (Finkelhor &Ormrod, 2000).

The NIBRS study finds that although family members comprise 35% of the offend-ers, acquaintances comprise 56% of the offenders, and strangers 9%. Such a large per-centage of crimes committed by acquaintances may indicate that, in fact, some or evena majority of these incidents may be occurring at school. Unfortunately, informationabout the location of the crimes is not available from this report. Once again, yetanother survey provides only partial, albeit new, information in the quest to know theprevalence of sexual assaults that occur at school, during the school day, by one’speers. The quest to compose a full and accurate picture continues.

Violence, Not Bullying

Bullying is sometimes used as euphemism for what we used to call sexism,racism, and homophobia. It is a term that makes adults feel more comfortable, but it




doesn’t do anything to stop gender harassment and sexual violence. Unfortunately,the new antibullying laws may serve to dilute the discourse of rights by minimizingor obscuring harassment and violence. When schools put the new antibullying lawsand policies into practice, the policies are often overly broad and arbitrary, resultingin students being suspended or expelled from schools for a variety of minor infrac-tions (Stein, 2001a).

On the other hand, sometimes egregious behaviors are framed by school person-nel as bullying, when in fact they may constitute illegal sexual or gender harassmentor even criminal hazing or assault (Stein, 2001b). In an era when school administra-tors are afraid of being sued for civil rights or harassment violations, as a consequenceof the May 1999 decision of the Supreme Court in the Davis case, naming the illegalbehaviors as “bullying” serves to deflect the school’s legal responsibility for the cre-ation of a safe and equitable learning environment onto an individual or group of indi-viduals as the culprit or culprits liable for the illegal conduct (Stein, 2001b). Underthe prevailing definition of bullying, almost anything has the potential to be calledbullying, from raising one’s eyebrow, giving “the evil eye,” making faces—all cultur-ally constructed activities—to verbal expressions of preference toward particularclassmates over others. We fear that there may be a tyranny of sameness that is implic-itly being proposed in this pursuit to eradicate bullying behaviors.

A Tyranny of Sameness: The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program

A great many schools across the country have adopted The Bullying PreventionProgram developed by Norwegian psychologist, Dan Olweus, chiefly because of itsstatus as a “blueprint” or model program by the OJJDP. Such status gives the Olweusapproach a legitimacy or unique standing among school-based bullying preventionapproaches and thus invites careful scrutiny.

Described as a “universal intervention for the reduction and prevention of bully/victimproblems” (Olweus, Limber, & Mihalic, 1999), the focus of the Olweus bullying pre-vention program is to make a school safe by increasing staff awareness of bullying,developing school rules, stopping bullies, and protecting victims. Evaluations in Norwayand in South Carolina have shown a reduced frequency in reports of bullying, improve-ments in school climate, and a drop in antisocial behavior such as theft, vandalism, andtruancy (Olweus, 1993; Olweus et al., 1999).

But the Olweus program harbors serious weaknesses of the kind we mention above.Specifically, it offers a one-size-fits-all view of bullying, not only with respect to themotivation for bullying and the characteristics of bullies, but also the form bullyingbehavior is likely to take. This tyranny of sameness erodes differences that make adifference in children’s lives, not only with respect to gender, but also with respect tosocial class, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, and ability. By assuming all bullying can be




approached and dealt with psychologically or relationally, the Olweus program ignoresor plays down the structural or institutional underpinnings of much bullying behavior inschools (for example, the impact of capitalism on the poor or the realities of racism inthe United States on students of color). Such homogenization means that those in sub-ordinate groups are further marginalized, because justified anger that comes from expe-riences of oppression or subordination carries the same valence and response in theOlweus model as anger that comes from a position of privilege and dominance oversomeone. Bullying that arises from such different sources can look and sound the same,but the differences matter a great deal not only to the individual, but to the kinds of rela-tionships and institutional practices good and fair schools must foster.

How does the Olweus method enact this sameness? It does so in a number of com-plicated ways, not apparent at first glance amidst the trainings that focus on class meet-ings, discussions with bullies and victims, role-playing, and meetings with parents.First and foremost, it does so by degendering bullying behavior and, in its trainingmaterials, ignoring the important distinction between criminal harassment and bully-ing. Consider the case study of 14-year-old Maria, “A Victim of Bullying,” excerptedfrom Olweus’core program against bullying and antisocial behavior: A teacher hand-book (Olweus, 2001, ch. 9, pp. 10-13). Teachers are told that the story of Maria, whoattempted to hang herself after a “long series of physical and verbal harassment” bytwo boys, is based on a detailed 1993 report from a Swedish newspaper. For 2 years

Maria had been pinched, pushed, and threatened. During woodworking class, the bul-lies had stabbed her with a file, tried to hit her hands with a hammer, and burned heron the neck. A common situation prior to class was that a group of students gatheredaround her, pushing her amongst them until she started to cry. During recess or breaks,she was chased around the schoolyard, her hair was pulled, she was called whore,witch, idiot, etc . . . . Sometimes she managed to flee to the toilet and lock the door. Onseveral occasions she sought refuge with various teachers. Maria was completely aloneat school; there was “open season” on her.

We learn that Maria’s mother and other parents made attempts to contact the school,to no avail. The school denied that problems with “bullying” existed and Maria wassent to the school psychologist, who was “nice” but ineffective.

In all references to the Maria incident—the journalists’ accounting, the summary ofthe school’s reaction, and subsequent attempts to encourage the teachers and adminis-trators reading this case to reflect on the incident as part of their training in the Olweusmethod (following the case are several “Items for Discussion,” such as “What concretemeasures should the school implement in the situation at hand?”)—this case is fullyaccepted as a general problem of school-based “bullying.” There is no serious consid-eration of gender-based power differences—no attempt to appreciate or unpack the dif-ferential effects of gendered insults such as “whore” and “witch;” no mention of howwoodworking class typically operates as a male space; no discussion of the ways the




perpetrators’ aggression connects to male privilege or masculine hegemony or howMaria’s responses might point to gender subordination. Most startling, there is no men-tion of the differences between Swedish and U.S. laws covering such gender-basedharassment—indeed, no distinction made between bullying and harassment at all—and no discussion questions that draw attention to Maria’s right to a school environ-ment (in the United States) that is gender safe or the school’s legal responsibility toprotect Maria.

This is but one example of the way the Olweus approach feeds an ever-increasingdemand for effective solutions to school-based bullying with psychologically basedmethods that efface social and structural forms of discrimination. Despite very gen-eral passing references to gender and social class (there are no references to race orethnicity) in his 1993 book, Bullying at school, nowhere does Olweus discuss in anydetail the impact of gender, race, class, or sexual identity on bullying behavior or theways schools can unintentionally reproduce such behavior. In fact, in an attempt toassure readers that anyone can bully, social class is dismissed as a variable. And inone of the two references to gender in his book, we receive a vague and simple refer-ence to reported gender differences in relational aggression.

When Olweus does provide examples of girls’ relational aggression, he does notaddress female socialization or explain how gender-based power relations impact thisbehavior (Brown, 2003). Consider the case of Linda, a “hidden bullying situation.”Again Linda’s story is extracted from a press clipping, presumably from Europe(Olweus, 1993, p. 19; Olweus, 2001, chap. 3, p. 5):

Linda, age 12, was allegedly bullied by her classmates because she was “too snobbish.”Linda had made friends with another girl in the class and they were always together.The leader of the little bully gang tried to destroy this friendship and finally succeeded,with the result that Linda became quite isolated. Later another girl in the bully gangtalked Linda into having a party at her home, and then made sure that no one came.

We know little to nothing about Linda with respect to social location. Given years ofresearch on the influence of culture and social context on the socialization of girls’behavior, this would seem important information (Adams, 1999, 2001; Bordo, 1993;Brown, 1998, 2003; Debold, Brown, Wessen, & Brookings, 1999; Eder, 1985; Fine& Macpherson, 1992; Gilligan, 1991: Hey, 1997; Leadbeater & Way, 1996; Merten,1997; Orenstein, 1994; Phillips, 2000; Thorne, 1993; Tolman, 2002; Ward, 2000;Way, 1995). Is Linda White or of color? How about the girls bullying her? Attendinga school that is predominantly White, of color? Is she poor, working class, middleclass? (That is, could the motivation for exclusion be connected to race or social class;in which case, how might school practices unwittingly either reinforce or effectivelyinterrupt such behavior?) How is the “little bully gang” socially positioned in theschool? (For U.S. girls, the term used to refer to the kinds of behaviors indicated inthis example is usually “clique”; the difference between a gang and a clique is, itself,




significant and should be interrogated.) How do ideals of feminine behavior or mediaimages of beauty play into this case? Is there a boy involved as there is so often inincidents of girlfighting? The answers to these and other questions would address theimpact of social capital and power relations that deeply impact the psychological andrelational experiences of children in schools. Asking teachers to answer the more gen-eral: “Could the students have reacted in other ways?” (a follow-up question in theworkbook) without first addressing the kinds of social realities impacting the perpe-trators and victim is like asking them to save a child in a river without knowledge ofthe current, the water temperature, or the distance from shore. They can jump in, butthey might not make it back safely.

The Olweus approach to bullying doesn’t erase gender—after all, we know thatMaria and Linda are female and we’ve been given a vague sense that boys are morelikely to bully directly and girls more likely to bully indirectly—so much as it ignoresthe complexities, power differentials, and lasting impact of the current sex-gendersystem. But this is as bad as or worse than erasure. Olweus gives the appearance oftaking gender seriously, but never gets around to any substantive examination of howgendered behavior varies with social context or how intersections of race, class, orsexual identity impact gendered experiences. His few references to gender differencescite studies conducted 30 years ago by Macoby and Jacklin and ignore a wealth ofmore current research. Moreover, in spite of lip service to gender, substantive descrip-tions of bullies, victims, and bullying behavior focus on boys and boys’ behavior.Bullies are “physically stronger” and have parents that tend to use “power-assertive”techniques of childrearing. Victims have “anxious reaction patterns,” are perceived as“physically weaker,” and tend to be boys with close relationships with their mothers(Olweus, 1993). In this way, the Olweus bullying prevention program participates ina form of symbolic annihilation (Dines & Humez, 1995; Ohye & Henderson Daniel,1999), “the tendency to ignore certain groups in cultural representations and dis-course or only to represent them when they fit with our socially rooted conceptions ofthem [italics added]” (Ohye & Henderson Daniel, 1999, p. 116). Their behavior leftunexplained, girls remain firmly entrenched in sex role stereotypes, “naturally” asso-ciated with indirect forms of aggression, such as “catty” or manipulative behaviors ordestroying friendships with gossip, exclusion, and other relational forms of cruelty.And because the Olweus approach does not address the impact of societal power dif-ferences, White girls, the poor, gays and lesbians, or boys and girls of color emergeprimarily to mark their difference from the conventional norm. This, of course, unwit-tingly reproduces a social hierarchy that places White middle class heterosexualmales at the top or at the center.

Olweus (1993) declares that eradicating bullying “boils down to a matter of will andinvolvement on the part of adults in deciding how much bullying should take place inour schools” (p. 128). His approach depends on adults actually seeing, interpreting, andthen consistently responding to what is going on among kids. But such an approach,without adequate training in the impact of the structural or systemic underpinnings of




bullying, or the distinction between bullying and various forms of harassment, meansthat adults are likely to interpret children’s behavior in ways that unwittingly perpetu-ate unfair school practices and contribute to the erosion of their civil rights.

Olweus is clear that bullying is about the imbalance and abuse of power. We agree.But bullying is about much more than a relational imbalance (between two children orbetween a child and a group of his or her peers) and the psychological consequences ofsuch relational power inequities. The Olweus method does not account for the convo-luted ways power is experienced, desired, expressed, and channeled in a sexist, racist,homophobic society, and thus his approach does not address the subterfuge of girl-to-girl or other forms of horizontal violence perpetrated by those in historically subordi-nated positions in U.S. culture (Brown, 2003). Effective bully-prevention programs inthe United States must start with research on diverse groups of children and take intoaccount social location (such as gender, race, class, and sexual identity), and they mustdistinguish peer-to-peer bullying from more egregious forms of sexual and racialharassment.

Recent studies of this kind reveal the limits of the Olweus model. For example,Brown’s (2003) study of 421 girls and young women, diverse with respect to race,class, and geographic location paints a very different portrait of what motivates andcharacterizes girls who fight with or bully other girls. For example, the Olweus modelestablished the following motivations for bullying behavior: a strong need for domi-nance and power; hostile fundamental attitude to one’s surroundings (typically the resultof conflict-filled family relationships); and material and psychological rewards fromtheir behavior, forcing victims to give them money or valuables, prestige (Olweus,2001). Brown (2003) finds other culturally mediated motivations for girl-to-girl aggres-sion and bullying, such as: competition over media ideals of beauty and female per-fection; justified (although misplaced) anger and aggression about mistreatment inschool, sexual harassment, and sexual objectification; jealousies over boys; a desire forrespect, for visibility and power through public performance that is either sexualizedor designed to garner respect and popularity; and care taking or ensuring their own andothers’ protection and survival.

Similarly, Olweus (2001) characterizes bullies as children who have a strong driveto dominate and oppress other students or to get their own way; who have a more pos-itive attitude toward violence than most; if boys, they’re often physically stronger thanfriends and victims; have a temper or are impulsive and have a hard time conformingto rules; they appear tough and impudent and show little compassion for students theybully; they are often aggressive to adults, teachers, and parents; and they are good attalking themselves out of difficult situations. Brown (1998, 2003), finds importantvariations in her studies of girls, who often talk about their victims in relationally com-plicated ways, even feeling sorry for them and sad about the outcomes; whose fight forvisibility is connected to the cultural denigration of femininity and a desire for powerthat adults (and the media) have told them they have a right to demand; who are lesslikely to be impulsive, to talk more, and to give their aggression more forethought.




Girls who bully are not necessarily aggressive to adults and can appear quite civilizedand “nice.”

It is important to consider these differences and the culturally mediated experiencesthat give rise to them if a bully prevention approach is to have long lasting effects onchildren’s behavior. Right now girls are put in the untenable situation of receivingsocial power for acting in ways that objectify them, render them less significant, lessvisible, and less in control. Given the current sex-gender system, the answer lies lessin the will of adults or their control over children than in appreciating girls’ need tohave more control in their lives, to feel important, to be visible, to be taken seriously,to have an effect. The best bully prevention approaches, for girls and also perhaps forboys, would move beyond the psychological or relational and tackle social and insti-tutional oppression by providing ways of understanding the limiting and damagingconstructions of gender, race, class, and sexual identity, and working to replace themwith alternative realities, critical tools, words, and ideals.

Conclusion

This article has reviewed the consequences of degendering violence and victim-ization for girls. It is widely acknowledged that the arena of violence against womenhas been haunted by the problems associated with constructions of “domestic vio-lence” that ignore the context of violence against women and women’s intent if theydo act out violently (for a review of this literature, see Miller, 2004). Less well under-stood is the fact that the same problems are also appearing in treatments of girls’ vio-lence and their victimization in schools and communities.

With reference to girls’ violence, there is a widespread notion that girls are becom-ing more violent, an impression fueled by steep increases in arrests of girls for assault.The public and, more to the point, policy makers have been repeatedly told that thisphenomenon is a product of girls becoming more like boys and acting out violently.As a consequence, although girls’ violence has actually been decreasing, girls’ arrestsfor this behavior have been increasing, fueled by a series of policy changes that arecriminalizing girls, particularly girls of color. Closer analysis of the impact of thesepractices show that contrary to the notion that these arrest trends reflect girls’ “mas-culinization,” they instead reflect emerging practices focused on control of girls infamily and school settings.

Similarly, this article has shown that girls are disadvantaged not only in the crim-inal justice system, but also in school systems. The construction of bullying preven-tion as a solution, just as the claim that girls have become as “masculinized” as boys,effaces persistent inequities that are both structural and psychological and that findtheir home in our educational and legal systems. Denying that there are differencesthat make a difference allows the bullying ideology to have an ascendancy that defiescommon sense and denies the reality that living in a patriarchy matters.




Note

1. Self-report data are one of “three major ways of measuring involvement in delinquent and criminalbehavior,” and most scholars agree that “self-report data appear acceptably valid and reliable for mostresearch purposes” (Thornberry & Krohn, 2000, p. 1). Focusing specifically on criterion validity, one sur-vey of the literature found a correlation of .60 between self-reports of arrests and actual arrests; other stud-ies have found even higher correlations (Thornberry & Krohn, 2000).

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Lyn Mikel Brown is professor of education at Colby College and creator of the Maine-based nonprofitHardy Girls Healthy Women (www.hghw.org). She is the author of four books on girls’ social and psycho-logical development: Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, RaisingTheir Voices: The Politics of Girls’Anger, Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls, and PackagingGirlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes.

Meda Chesney-Lind, PhD, is professor of women’s studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Herbooks include Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice, The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime,Female Gangs in America, Invisible Punishment, and Girls, Women and Crime.

Nan Stein, a senior research scientist at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College, has con-ducted research on zero tolerance, teen dating violence, sexual harassment, and gender violence in K-12schools. She has coauthored four teacher’s guides on sexual harassment, bullying, and gender violenceand has published many book chapters, law review articles, and articles for academic journals and theeducational press.




Patriarchy Matters: Toward a Gendered Theory of Teen Violence and Victimization

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